The Problem with the Inclusion Framing
Since the early 2000s, the phrase 'financial inclusion' has dominated development finance conversations about the Pacific. Millions of dollars in donor funding, regulatory reform, and technical assistance have been directed at the goal of including the unbanked in formal financial systems. The metric of success, almost universally, has been the number of people with accounts. This is the wrong metric. And it has led, in many cases, to the wrong interventions. An account that someone opens once to receive a donor disbursement and never uses again is not financial inclusion in any meaningful sense. It is a data point that flatters a programme evaluation. What matters is not having an account. It is being able to do something useful with it, repeatedly, in a way that is easier, cheaper, or safer than the alternative.
What Utility Actually Means
Financial utility means that a financial service does something valuable for the person using it. It reduces the cost of sending money home. It makes saving more private and harder to tap for social obligations. It allows a small business to accept payments from customers who do not carry cash. It provides a record of income that a lender can read. These are not the same as having an account. They require products that are genuinely useful in the context of how Pacific people actually live and work — not products designed for a Western banking customer and ported to a Pacific market with a different SIM card. The distinction sounds semantic. It is not. When you build for utility rather than inclusion, you make completely different product decisions. You prioritise use cases over registration rates. You measure transaction frequency rather than account opening. You design for the merchant as well as the customer, because a payment product with no merchant acceptance has no utility at all.
The M-PAiSA Lesson
When M-PAiSA launched in 2010, the early metrics were dominated by registration numbers — understandably, given the donor-funded origins of the programme. But the UNCDF's Impact Pathways work taught us something important: the most meaningful outcomes came from high-frequency users who were embedding M-PAiSA into the daily operations of their businesses and households. One long-time user, a baker operating on the outskirts of Suva, did not just open an M-PAiSA account. She used it to receive payment from customers, to pay suppliers, to save a small amount each week. The account was not the intervention. The utility was the intervention. And the utility changed her business. That insight reshaped how we thought about product development at Vodafone Fiji. It led us to invest in merchant QR payments, in bill payment integrations, in loan products accessible directly from the wallet. The goal was always to make M-PAiSA more useful, not merely more prevalent.
Implications for How We Build
Merchant acceptance is not optional. A wallet that can only receive money but not spend it is a savings jar, not a payment system. Every Pacific digital wallet should be judged partly on the breadth and depth of its merchant acceptance network — including informal market vendors, transport operators, and rural agents. The use case must precede the product. What is the specific thing this person needs to do that they cannot do easily now? Start there. Do not start with a technology and look for applications. Design for the low-data, low-literacy environment. Not every Pacific consumer is a smartphone user comfortable with app navigation. USSD menus, voice prompts in local languages, and agent-assisted transactions are not legacy features — they are the interface that reaches the communities that most need financial utility.
A New Scorecard
Here is the scorecard I would apply to any Pacific FinTech programme, donor investment, or product launch. Not: How many accounts were opened? But: How many people transact at least once a month? Not: What is the total registered user count? But: What is the average number of transaction types per active user? Not: Is there a digital wallet available in this market? But: Is there a merchant acceptance network dense enough that a consumer in this community could plausibly go cashless for a week? These are harder questions to answer. They require better data, longer evaluation periods, and a willingness to report honestly on programmes that have impressive registration numbers but disappointing usage rates. But they are the questions that actually tell us whether FinTech is changing lives in the Pacific.